boosts performance on the HQV tests. The high end media PC received a score of 103, 24 points higher than the score given the low end PC with its Radeon X1250 GPU. Is PC-Based HDMI Ready For Prime Time? We've come to two seemingly unassailable conclusions...

• -Building A High-End Media PC, Continued
• -Building A High-End Media PC
• -Benchmarks And Results Compared
• -System Builder Marathon (Media PCs): Day 3

points at the time the benchmarks were developed. Specific systems at the low and high ends of the PC performance spectrum define reference points for low (1200) and high (5500) ends of the PCMark05 point scale. Nevertheless, values higher than 5500 or lower...

up to 4 SATA hard disks (Dell will install only 3) with up to 2 TB of storage, RAID or not, as you chose. Phew! Things are starting to heat up already. Then there's the built-in water-cooling unit... Even in high end PCs, you don't find that many water...

system score is computed. PCMark scores are scaled to run between 1200 and 5500. Low and high end reference systems are used to scale and compute the low (1200) and high (5500) scores. However, scores less than 1200 and greater than 5500 are possible. Here...

others we've built in the past for Gear Digest, and we'll show you some photographs of these two builds. Though we couldn't quite reach the esoteric heights of technology we hoped to explore with our high end media PC, we had no trouble tripling our outlays...

but only on larger displays. On the smaller Dell 2407 monitor we used for testing, differences at the high end were difficult, if not impossible, to see. When we did hook up the PC, the receiver (and speakers) and the Sony KDL-46XBR3, the highest high-definition...